


cold climate love

by epistolic



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 04:39:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows he isn’t built to be a father. His world is a world of frank destruction; and it’s a world he loves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cold climate love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sunflashes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflashes/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [cold climate love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/933175) by [baysian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/baysian/pseuds/baysian)



> Written because I have ALL THE HERC HANSEN FEELINGS. I've played around a bit with the timelines in this fic; it doesn't match up with the novelisation because I've had this crazy headcanon for Herc rolling around my brain for ages, and I didn't want to change it! Sorry. I hope you enjoy this anyway /o\

In the Drift, there is a woman.

He doesn’t mean for this particular memory to surface. When you have been Drifting for as long as he has – twenty years, almost the length of the War – you learn shortcuts. Tricks. You learn to bury the little things, the dark things, deep where nobody will look. Or, alternatively, you learn to bring other things to the surface: bright, messy things that will hide, obscure, distract. 

Anything to keep a secret.

Chuck, though, Chuck had rooted it out. Eventually. He hadn’t thought the boy had it in him. Too much violence and not enough rebellion to chase the rabbit. 

The woman shakes her head and smiles at him.

“Ah, but Herc,” she says. “Like father, like son.”

\--

At birth: a scrawny, purple thing, with a weak cry like the cry of a cat.

Bones not fully formed – still as soft as jelly. Nothing like the steel that Herc is used to by now; not the whine of generators, the screech of turbines, the noisy glide of metal on metal, sparks showering and electricity fizzling sharp up the spine. None of that. None of what Herc Hansen understands.

Angela clutches at his hand. “Herc, stay a while. Just a while. He’s your son. We still have to name him.”

“Oh, Angela,” he says.

There is a War going on outside. He is already suited up. They’ve pulled him out of deployment for this, for one moment, and the adrenaline is still spitting hot in his veins.

It isn’t that he doesn’t love her, not exactly. It’s just that he also has to save the world.

“You name him, Ange,” he says. “I have to go.”

\--

His own father, a mechanic who’d come over from Ireland in the time of Thatcher, had left him mostly alone.

He’d grown up mostly by himself. Played by himself. Fought by himself. He’d caught his father’s brogue and ironed it out in school, making little tweaks here and there in order to avoid the attention of other children. He’d had a reputation for a temper – people shook their heads: _it’ll be that father of his_ – he’d studied but done poorly, run through his neighbour’s sprinkler systems in the summer, dated girls, slept with them, discarded them or frightened them away.

He watches Chuck grow with a certain fear. He knows he isn’t built to be a father. He doesn’t have the requisite gentle words, the paternal pat on the back or the friendly scruffing of the hair. His world is a world of frank destruction; and it’s a world he loves.

“Aren’t you taking the weekend off?” Leila says.

He looks at her. Traces with his eyes the quicksilver curve of her shoulders, the beautiful, narrow taper of her hips.

He grins, and she grins back. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether or not you’ll be coming with me.”

She laughs. Leila Rogers has been his co-pilot for six months now and he knows every part of her; knows her better than he knows his wife. Angela doesn’t, and would never, understand this.

“You’re one smooth bastard, you know that?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I know.”

“You should go home and spend some time with Ange. You’ve barely seen her in months.”

“Nah,” Herc Hansen says. “Maybe later.”

Whenever he is home nowadays, he feels cold. He feels stifled. The four walls weigh down on him. 

It’s nothing compared to the open sea: a roaring blue canvas battering at your legs, ready for you to write the future upon. Once you’ve had a taste of it you don’t go back.

\--

“I don’t want you to go,” Angela says.

She is sitting at the dining room table. Her small hands, pale and thin, are folded on the wood – he can see how white her knuckles are.

He opens the fridge. “Ange, don’t fight me on this. You know I have to. It’s part of the mission.”

“It’s not. I know it isn’t. I know you could get out of it if you wanted to. Heaps of people have, and if they can, you can.” Her voice is trembling slightly. “You just don’t want to. You _want_ to leave.”

“Angela.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps. “You only ever call me that when you want something from me.”

“I don’t want anything from you. I just don’t want our last few weeks together to be full of arguing.” He’s bent over, not looking at her, rustling amongst the shelves. His head is already out of the country: he’s already in America. “It’s only for a year. I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Well, what about Chuck?”

“He’ll understand that his daddy’s needed elsewhere.”

“No, he _won’t_ ,” Angela suddenly cries out. He looks up, stunned; she sounds as if she’s in pain. “He _won’t_ , Herc. He’s five. What the hell does he know about the War? What the hell does he know about you out there, with nothing but a few layers of steel between you and a monster? Have you thought about what’s going to happen if you die over there?”

“I’m not going to die. It’s a straightforward assignment, Ange, it’s a three-Jaeger drop, I’ll have two full teams at my back – ”

“You’re not going.”

“Ange, I’ve already said yes.”

She stares up at him. Heat flushes up into her cheeks. 

“You said yes before you’d even spoken about it with me?”

“Well, I thought you’d be alright with – ”

“I want a divorce.”

She says it so calmly that he cuts himself off. The entire kitchen rings with silence.

“We’re not getting a divorce,” he says at last.

“Why not? You don’t want this family. You don’t care about us. Your son has a better relationship with the family dog than with you.” She tips her chin up, stares him down. “Am I wrong?”

“Ange, can’t we sort this out once I come back?”

“That’s up to you,” she says. “It’s your choice. But if you go, Herc, we’re not going to be here when you come back.”

(In the end, she’s as good as her word.)

\--

In San Diego, he asks Leila to sleep with him.

She gives him a look: a sharp, quizzical jerk of her brow. “Herc. Do you even know what you’re doing?”

“Of course. I’m a free man now,” he tells her. “Ange left me.”

“You don’t want me,” Leila says. “Trust me. I’ve been in your mind. I know.”

“I want you.”

She shakes her head. “No. You want something else. Something nobody can give you, least of all someone like me.” A strange sort of pity goes into her eyes. “Herc, you’re drunk. You should go back to quarters, have a bit of a lie-down.”

“No, it’s alright,” he says. “I’m fine.”

But he never asks her, or anybody else, again.

\--

He stays in San Diego for a year; and then a year longer; and then a year longer still.

They transfer him to Mexico for six months. It’s a nightmare deployment, the country already visibly crumpling underneath the pressure of attack upon attack, clean water nowhere to be found along the coast. He breathes red dust and plaster on a daily basis. The waves are rough and the repairs are slow.

After Mexico: Fiji, or what’s left of it, Japan, the north island of New Zealand. The Mark II is introduced and he is one of the first to be inside the cockpit. He spends entire days on patrol, wading through the ocean like a child wading through a swimming pool.

He is fiercely, feverishly, unconvincingly, happy.

\--

“Angela Wakefield speaking,” she says.

Her voice is clear and unhurried. He wonders where she is.

“You haven’t changed your phone number,” he says.

There is a pause, but to her credit, it isn’t more than a split second. “No, Herc, I haven’t. I’m not trying to hide from anyone. How have you been?”

“Alright, I guess,” he says. “Did some travelling.”

“Yeah, I saw you on TV a few times.”

He doesn’t quite understand why he’s doing this. He can’t remember picking up the phone; can’t remember dialling her number. In the past five years he hasn’t thought much about her – but still, here he is, back in Sydney.

“Chuck’s doing well,” she says at last.

“Is he? That’s good.”

“His grades are a bit worrying. I think he might have some sort of dyslexia, I want to take him to a specialist sometime in the next month. He takes such a long time to read anything.”

“I was never much good at school myself,” he says. He stops. He clears his throat. “Listen, Ange, do you think I could – ”

“No,” she interrupts. There isn’t any heat in her voice. “No, Herc, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I just want to see him. Just once. He’s my son, Ange.”

“He hasn’t seen you in five years. And he never saw very much of you before then, either.” She sighs: a rustle of static down the line. “Herc, he idolises you. He sees you on news programs all the time, he’s _proud_ of you, proud that his daddy’s off defeating all the Kaiju and saving lives around the world. You’re a dream to him, Herc. You’re not real. Don’t ruin it for him.”

He opens and closes his mouth. “But Ange – ”

“You’re only going to fail him. You’re only going to come back into his life for a day, then leave him again. We both know he deserves better than that.”

He swallows the knot in his throat. Most pilots have a picture of their family tucked in their wallet, or on their person somewhere, but he’s never had one of those. To be honest he can barely remember his own son’s face.

“Just tell me which school he’s at, then,” he says finally. “I won’t visit. I’ll just – drive past, maybe. I’ll make sure he doesn’t see me.”

She hesitates. “Herc, I’m not sure – ”

“I promise you. I just want to know. I’ll keep my distance.”

There’s a long silence as she thinks it through.

“Alright,” she finally says.

\--

The thing to remember with Jaegers is, they don’t always win.

When Scissure breaks through the three-Jaeger team they’ve set up for him in Sydney Harbour, chaos reigns. None of the other units can be deployed in a reasonable timeframe – two are in repair bays, one broken down to be shipped to Papua New Guinea. Roads are ripped up. Buildings are razed to the ground. The earth shakes.

“Shit,” Leila is muttering under her breath, over and over again. “Shit, _shit_ – they say we might be ready to deploy in half an hour. Half a fucking hour! And with only a quarter of the repairs finished. Do you think – hey, where are you going?”

He’s moving already. “They’re going to nuke.”

“What? They’re not going to nuke, this isn’t Mexico! It’s different when everyone’s already evacuated! There’s a whole fucking civilian population – Herc, stop, you have to be back here in half an hour!”

Later, he’ll realise: it was never a choice. For years he’d chased something, chased freedom with a desperation right there in his bones, chased the world and all the things in it. He’d left behind anything he’d felt would slow him down. But now, without even thinking about it, his body moves towards the door – towards his family, lost to him, somewhere there in the city.

He never makes it back in time.

\--

In the Drift, Leila’s sitting cross-legged opposite him. She’s patting her jacket for a pack of smokes.

“You left it in your jeans,” he finds himself saying.

Her mouth twitches. “Bossing me around, even when I’m dead.”

He hadn’t made it back, so she’d headed out in an unrepaired Jaeger with a temporary pilot; the handshake had given out halfway mid-combat. The other pilot had pulled out in a panic and Leila, straining to keep the Jaeger moving on her own, had died an hour later from a massive intracerebral haemorrhage.

“Leila,” he tries to say.

“Stop.” She pauses in her search, sighs. “Herc, you don’t need to apologise to me. It won’t make a difference. I’m not even real.”

“I shouldn’t have left.”

She doesn’t answer. She watches him. 

She was never his conscience even when she was alive, and she certainly isn’t now.

\--

He doesn’t know how to make things better. What do boys like? What do children like? What would his son, his little twelve-year-old son, like?

Angela would know, but Angela has been dead for a year now.

He buys his son a dog.

\--

“No,” he says immediately.

Chuck simply looks at him. This isn’t the Chuck he pulled out of the rubble eight years ago: the frightened little boy, shaky on his legs, heartbeat galloping against his father’s chest. The child crying into the pillow for two months straight. The child with his mother’s photograph hidden under his bed.

This Chuck is nineteen now and there’s something cold and harsh in his expression.

“No?” Chuck says, braced in the doorway. “What do you mean, no? You’re going to stop me?”

“Chuck, you’re too young.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Exactly. You’re too young.”

Max, trailing his leash, comes waddling into the room. In the past few years the animal’s swollen up like a balloon. He watches the dog shove a dripping maw into Chuck’s leg, whining.

Chuck bends, scratches Max absently behind the ears. “Well, it’s too late. I’ve already registered.”

“What?” He drops his pen onto the table. “Chuck, we haven’t even talked about – ”

“Don’t lecture me,” Chuck snaps at him. “You’re a fine one to try and talk me out of this. The great hero pilot who ran away the moment a Kaiju broke through the ranks – do you know what everyone calls you behind your back, old man? They call you a coward.” Chuck straightens, glaring. “A _coward_.”

“Nobody calls me that who isn’t one himself.”

“ _I’m_ calling you one.”

He looks at his son. Mouth hard as flint, not a sliver of uncertainty about him.

“Why do you want to be a pilot?” he asks at last.

“Why do you care?” Chuck bites back. He stoops, picks the dog up. “I’m going to take Max for a walk.”

“Wait. Chuck.”

“ _What_?”

He picks up his pen. Shifts it from one hand to the other. “I know you blame me for deserting that day.”

“What the fuck does it matter what I think?” Chuck says, rough. “Hundreds of people died. You could’ve saved them, but you didn’t. That’s a fact. Whether I blame you or not doesn’t change a thing.”

He wants to say: but this is what you learn. This is what you always discover. You think at first that you are fighting to save the world – the countless faces you have never seen, the names you have never learned, the millions of lives you have never before made a dent upon. But you aren't. In the end, you are always fighting for yourself: for your family, for those in your life that you love. 

“Chuck,” he finds himself saying. His voice cracks midway. “Chuck – ”

“I don’t want to hear it, old man. I’m leaving.”

He had wanted to say: _You were worth it. You’ve always been worth it, to me._

But his son is already gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [Tumblr](http://epistolica.tumblr.com), [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com), or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


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